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Yell, Sam, If You Still Can
Just finished this brilliant new book (well, new translation) by Maylis Besserie. The original was published in France in 2020 and won “Goncourt du premier roman”, a prestigious French literary prize for first time novelists. This translation, by Clíona Ní Ríordáin, was only just published last month. I don’t tend to read much new fiction for some reason, but this caught my eye on the shelf.
Set during the last months of Samuel Beckett’s life in the Le Tiers-Temps retirement home in Paris, it provides a fictionalised account of his slow decay, as his body and mind begin to fail him. The narrative is an interior one, largely in the first person, consisting of a mesh of memories, musings and contemplation's. It moves between his current situation in the home, but also calls up the ghosts of his past - including James Joyce, and others. This interior voice is occasionally interspersed by the colder, dispassionate voices of and written reports by the various medics and care workers who are monitoring the ailing Beckett.
It’s written very well, albeit I can’t read French to compare the original. Naturally it’s a very tall order indeed to try and imagine the internal thoughts of someone as formidable as Beckett, but Besserie does a fine job. Thankfully there is no attempt to pastiche his writing style, but I think she manages to capture the existential concerns and dark wit that Beckett had. Essentially she succeeds in imagining Beckett transformed into one of his own characters. As Besserie puts it she “reconstructs a version of Beckett from real and imaginary facts, as if he were a character at the end of his life, like those who inhabit his own work”.
Had lined up Cormac McCarthys Suttree next, after recently finishing Blood Meridian, but after reading this I was in the notion to dip into some of Sam again.
Dream of Fair to Middling Women
So currently reading this one, which I had actually never heard of before. I’m about halfway through. It was Beckett’s first novel, written in a matter of weeks in 1932 when he was just twenty-six, and never published within his lifetime (other than a few fragments). It was rejected by publishers at the time and then simply shelved.
It is more clearly autobiographical than the other Beckett novels I have read. Our protagonist is a young man called Belacqua (an alter ego which also features in some of Beckett’s short stories), essentially being to Beckett what Stephen Dedalus was to Joyce, albeit without the distance of time. The back cover informed me that this was “very much a young man's book, drunk on its own cleverness and the author's formidable learning.”
Well by christ I would have to agree. It’s certainly a challenge for the old intellect, let's just say. When I can understand just what the hell is going on, I am enjoying the wonderfully rich writing style and the affected, almost unbelievably high-brow humour. It’s full of dense literary allusions, puns and a macaronic wit (hence why I tend to have google translate handy). Drunk on its own cleverness is right; if you ever want to get an acute sense of your own intellectual shortcomings this would be a fine place to start. Twenty-six year old Beckett is smarter than us and he definitely knows it.
In some ways it’s like reading some of the densest Dedalus sections of Ulysses; in its experimental style, nonlinear (almost nonexistent) plot and it’s profound rejection of literary realism it also hues close to Finnegans Wake (which I confess I have never gotten far with).
Yet nonetheless I haven’t stopped reading. My eyes glaze over certain passages with a combination of bewilderment, awe and humour (sometimes just bewilderment…), but there is definitely something enjoyable about it all the same. Particularly when certain passages do just click. Although it’s very high-brow, it doesn’t have the seriousness of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, or even Beckett’s later stuff. It’s wild and fun in a bawdy young man’s way, albeit filtered through a profoundly intellectual writing style.
Thank you for the lovely summary. I am keen on reading more Beckett, as I have only read a few of his plays, which were very good.
The past month or so, I have read:
H.O Mounce- Introduction to the Tractatus
Carlo Rovelli- "Helgoland"
Hans- Johann Glock- "What Is Analytic Philosophy?"
Reading Martin Heidegger's "What Is Called Thinking?" now.
